The Wing Commander Saga Website is in low-bandwidth mode in an effort to stay online amid the demand for the promised release of Wing Commander Saga: The Darkest Dawn, the fan-created project based on the Wing Commander series of space combat games. The Windows version is the first to be released, and they say the Linux and OS X editions are still in the works. They have a list of mirrors and the download can also be found on AtomicGamer and Gamer's Hell. Here's what they have to say to mark the occasion:

On many occasions, we have referred to Wing Commander Saga: The Darkest Dawn as a labor of love. That is truly what it has been for us. Many years ago, Chris Roberts and his team at Origin ignited our imaginations with their innovative, blockbuster Wing Commander series. Our hope has always been that with Wing Commander Saga, we could recapture that excitement and magic to some degree and share it with all of you. Our ten year development process has certainly taught us even more respect for just how innovative and brilliant Chris Roberts and his team are. Our development of Wing Commander Saga: The Darkest Dawn is meant as an homage to them and what they achieved, and we would like to thank them and EA, who holds the intellectual property for Wing Commander. We would also like to thank all the sites who have generously offered to provide mirrors for Saga.

Tom wrote on Mar 22, 2012, 18:06:DDL through Gamer's Hell is averaging 550KB/sec and I'm at 600MB so far.

I actually was downloading both at the same time to see which one was faster, but apparently my Net connection is bogged down from everyone streaming their @#@$! Netflix crap! *sigh* Such is the price you pay for cable...It finally did go up to about 200k/sec for a while but it was erratic and I couldn't go anywhere web-wise so I said screw it until tomorrow...

=-Rigs-=

'Now we gave you a promise! And we are bound by that promise. And damn you for asking for it! And damn me for agreeing to it! And damn all of us to Hell because that is exactly where we're going!' -John Sheridan, 'And All My Dreams Torn Asunder', B5

Not to belittle the effort that went into this, but all the movie quotes were starting to get on my nerves. Is this a translation issue, because it's pretty obvious when you rip a line from a well-known film and use it as dialog or chatter. Also, I would have loved to have seen this in a prettier engine like the one Freelancer used. Oh well.

DaZ wrote on Mar 22, 2012, 18:53:I was excited for this, but the first mission involved flying towards a nav marker for 15 minutes without anything happening. I quit and haven't had another look yet.

What an awful way to introduce players to your game

Is there a time compress or auto nav key? In wing commander games, there was usually a key to press to auto navigate to next waypoint. That 15 min flight would be a 10 second one. It would bring you out if you ran into something on the way. In wing commander, one rarely flies in empty space with nothing around for more than a minute or two because of the auto nav key.

If they aren't telling players new to the wing commander series this basic stuff in some sorta tutorial, thats bad.

DangerDog wrote on Mar 22, 2012, 19:28:I never got into it, but boy did it spark a surge in sound card sales back in the day. I remember there was a separate speech add-on you could buy.

very expensive game when you added it all up.

That's nowhere near the price of buying the game and all the map packs for a game like MW2.Plus, that wasn't for all the wing commader games. Just back when the games were on floppies. The speech pack added a chunk of more floppies and space required in days when people were buying hard drives WAY under 1 gb. So many people wouldn't want that. I don't think I bothered with the speech pack when it came out, but when I picked up the re-release on CD it had all that stuff (including the mission packs) included.

Wing Commander II as I recall was one of the big drivers for gamers to upgrade their computers. It required a faster CPU, and more memory than normal (386 and 1 meg as I recall).

I'm getting like 18k/sec on the torrent even with over a 100 seeders and peers.... *sigh*

=-Rigs-=

'Now we gave you a promise! And we are bound by that promise. And damn you for asking for it! And damn me for agreeing to it! And damn all of us to Hell because that is exactly where we're going!' -John Sheridan, 'And All My Dreams Torn Asunder', B5